


The Peter Parker Problem

by igrockspock



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/M, Getting Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27247714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: Connor and Dawn try to pretend to be normal for each other.  They're not very good at it.
Relationships: Connor (AtS)/Dawn Summers
Comments: 19
Kudos: 44
Collections: Fic In A Box





	The Peter Parker Problem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ancslove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancslove/gifts).



“Hey there, tall and broody.”

Connor’s head snaps up at the unfamiliar female voice, and Stanford’s campus coalesces around him, replacing the memories of the rain-soaked alley in Los Angeles where he’d fought the apocalypse alongside his father, the vampire chosen to be humanity’s champion.

“I wasn’t brooding,” he says quickly, even though he was definitely brooding.

“Could’ve fooled me,” the girl says. “Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of brooding. So what’s the deal?”

Connor squints up at her. Her brown hair flows down to her waist, and he’s not too far gone to appreciate her legs, which are frankly _insanely_ long.

“Do you ever feel like you’re not real?” he blurts out and then winces. Losing normal conversation skills is apparently an unanticipated side effect of fighting the apocalypse.

“Oh my god, all the time,” she says.

Connor rolls his eyes. “You’re making fun of me.”

“I wish,” she says, her tone too light hearted for him to believe she _really_ knows what he’s talking about. She tugs on his wrist. “Come on, the rest of the tour group is leaving without us. And I think you’re supposed to be the leader.”

“That I am,” he says with a sigh and jogs to the front of the waiting gaggle of freshmen.

“On your right, you’ll see the library,” he says. “Pro tip, the Bender Room has the comfiest couches, but it gets cold in there, so bring a jacket. The Marine Bio study area has the best view, but you have to get there early to snag a seat.” He punctuates the advice with a smile, just a normal sophomore passing on his accumulated wisdom to the arriving freshman class.

He can do this, he tells himself. He can fight evil _and_ have a normal life.

After the tour, he wills himself to be friendly. Not being able to talk honestly about his life anymore is kind of a drag, but he doesn’t have to be an asshole. The girl from before is hanging out on the edge of the tour group, and Connor figures she’s probably shy, maybe far away from home. 

“So, Dawn,” he says, reading the large block letters off her name tag. “Where are you from?”

She cringes a little at the question. “The mouth of hell,” she says matter-of-factly, then rolls her eyes. “Well, not literally. Just Sunnydale. You know, the town that fell into the sink hole a few years back.”

“Right.” Connor fumbles for a response. “And your family and friends…”

“Made it out on a school bus about a second before the highway collapsed,” she says, still matter-of-fact. “But it was good, actually, to get away. I mean, losing the house sucked, but we got to move to Europe after. So, you know, no complaints here.” She pauses. “Sorry. My back story is a total non-sequitur. I mean, what do you say after someone tells you that their whole hometown got wiped off the face of the earth?” She waves her hands like she’s trying to clear the air. “So let’s move on. Where are you from?”

“Twisted hellscape,” Connor says, matching her matter-of-fact tone. He pauses for a second, waiting for her to look shocked or scared or confused or something -- any of the dozens of awkward reactions he’d imagined the truth would engender. 

Dawn just says, “Oh really? Which one?”

He manages a hopefully not too awkward laugh. “I was born in LA, but I don’t really remember living there. I, uh, moved when I was really young. I grew up in Ohio.”

“Nice, normal, all-American childhood,” Dawn says, nodding slowly.

“Yes,” Connor says, with just a touch too much force. “Absolutely.”

***

“Brooding again?”

For the second time in as many days, Connor looks up at the sound of Dawn’s voice.

“No, never,” he says quickly. He shoves away his money and banking textbook with a sigh. “Okay, maybe a little. It turns out that I am not nearly as interested in economics as I thought I was.”

“What are you interested in?” she asks, sliding into the seat across from him. They’re in the library, but she doesn’t have any books with her, which means... she was actually looking for him?

“Existential philosophy,” he says, tapping the unopened textbook on the table. “Of course, my dad’s all _plastics, young Benjamin_ , so I don’t think I can get away with changing my major.”

Dawn smirks at that. “The Graduate was my mom’s favorite movie. She ditched an engineering major to open an art gallery.”

Connor notices the past tense and decides not to ask what happened. “Did it work out for her?” he asks instead.

“Yeah. I mean, we weren’t rich or anything, but we had what we needed, and she was doing what she loved.” Dawn’s quiet smile brightens to a full-fledged grin. “So, tell me a story from this all-American childhood in Ohio.”

“Baseball,” he says. “There was a lot of baseball.” This isn’t technically a lie, since Dawn had specifically asked for the all-American half of his childhood -- which, weirdly, is still the part that _feels_ real, even if he hadn’t technically lived it. “We had a neighborhood team,” he says, and when Dawn nods encouragingly, he adds, “there was this one summer that was pretty wild. A new kid moved in, and he knocked his stepdad’s signed baseball over the fence. We had to get it back before he got caught, but it went into a junkyard, and there was this dog called The Beast --”

“You think I don’t know that’s the plot of The Sandlot?” Dawn snaps.

Connor _didn’t_ know -- his parents had been pretty strict about TV time when he was a kid -- but this isn’t the first time one of his so-called memories turned out to be the plot of a movie. He almost tells the truth. _See, this sorcerer who invented my memories didn’t know what a happy human childhood looked like, so he hit up the local Blockbuster._ For some reason, he thinks Dawn might just blink and say, _yeah, that happens sometimes._ But that’s just wishful thinking. 

Since he doesn’t want to get carted away to the mental asylum today, he grins and says, “Yeah, you got me. The truth isn’t very interesting actually. Just a lot of Little League games and cookouts in the backyard. Not much different from anyone else’s childhood.”

Dawn stands up abruptly, an expression on her face that Connor can’t quite place. Disappointed, maybe. Or angry, which makes sense if she thought he was screwing with her.

At the last second, she turns and drops a slip of paper onto his econ textbook. “My number. If you ever want to talk about not feeling real.”

***

Connor’s roommate finds the number on his nightstand a few days later. Okay, _four_ days later. Connor knows exactly when he last spoke to Dawn, remembers practically every word in the conversation.

“You gonna call her?” Enoch asks. He’s a good guy, somebody Connor had met at freshman orientation last year. They both played Ultimate Frisbee and wanted to start their own businesses one day. From a guy perspective, it’s enough for a pretty decent friendship, although Connor can’t remember if they’ve ever talked about anything that matters.

Now he stretches his legs out on his twin mattress and says, “I dunno, man. Not sure if I can risk exposing her to my alter ego.”

Enoch snorts. “Yeah, you’re a real Peter Parker. Mild mannered by day, fighting crime by night.”

And that’s the end of the conversation. Connor leans back against his pillow. He’s getting good at making the truth sound like a sarcastic joke, and he’s not sure if that fact is lonely, reassuring, or both.

He ought to throw the phone number away. His secret life as a demon hunter may be in its infancy, but he’s seen this movie before. It never ends well for the girl. He should bide his time, wait for a werewolf like Angel’s girlfriend, or maybe a half-demon from a more assimilationist species. Angel had said those exist.

Still, whenever he glimpses Dawn in the quad or the dining hall, she’s alone, rarely exchanging more than passing greetings with the students around her. That’s why Connor settles onto the grass next to her -- not because _he_ feels lonely for the first time in his life.

“So,” he says. “You want to talk about not feeling real?”

As pickup lines go, it’s pretty crap, and Dawn clearly thinks so too.

“Took you long enough,” she snaps.

“I know. I should’ve called earlier.” He swallows. “The truth is, I was scared.” Dawn’s expression softens at the admission, and that makes him brave enough to ask, “Maybe I could buy you an ice cream?”

“Nope.” Dawn’s refusal is quick and flat. 

“Ouch. That was fast,” Connor says, preparing to stand up and accept defeat.

“You didn’t let me finish,” Dawn says primly. “You can buy me biscuits and gravy.”

“That’s...specific,” Connor says, although he knows a diner not far from campus.

“Yeah, well, there’s no biscuits in Europe. Or there are, but they think biscuits mean cookies. Not the good kind though. Just sad little wafers to dunk in your tea.” She wrinkles her nose, which is frankly _adorable._

“That sounds really tragic,” he says, and Dawn stands up and loops one of her arms through his. The floral scent of her shampoo drifts toward him, and he wonders if everyone can smell it, or if it’s a perk of his super senses.

“No, the real tragedy is the lack of peanut butter,” she says. “Also tater tots, onion rings, and fluffy breakfast pancakes. It’s practically the reason I came back to the United States.”

He tightens his arm around Dawn’s. Right now, at this moment, he feels completely normal, for the first time since the apocalypse. How is that even a sentence in his brain? He shoves the thought back. He’s not thinking about world endy doom right now, not even a little bit.

“You came back for junk food? And breakfast treats?” he asks.

“Well, that and the best ancient studies program in the world. Girl’s gotta have her ancient Sumerian, you know?”

Connor decidedly does not know. “How did you get interested in that?”

Dawn shrugs. “I used to hang out in the library with my sister a lot. You get some weird hobbies that way.”

“So your sister’s a nerd,” Connor says.

“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Dawn says, pulling away from him when she sees the red striped awning that shelters the diner. “ _I’m_ the family nerd.”

The conversation doesn’t really make sense -- who drags their kid sister to the library for hours on end if they’re not a nerd? He wants to ask, but Dawn’s already grabbed a table and flagged down a waitress. Apparently she’s _really_ into breakfast.

When Dawn finishes devouring her biscuits, Connor slides a pancake onto her plate. “So, about the not feeling real,” he says, trying to keep his voice casual.

“It started when I found out I was adopted. I was thirteen, I think.” She talks around a mouthful of pancake, gesturing with her fork, like this conversation isn’t weird. “It just made my whole life feel like a lie, you know?”

“The love was real,” Connor says quickly. It’s been his grounding truth, these last few months. So many people loved him in so many different ways, and some of them made a mess of it, but it didn’t change the feelings. “I’m adopted too,” he adds, just in case she thinks he’s condescending.

“Did you know?” she asks, at last slowing her ravenous breakfast consumption. “I mean, from when you were little?”

“Yeah, always. My birth mom killed herself right after I was born, and my dad couldn’t really give me the kind of life he wanted. And my parents -- the ones who adopted me, I mean -- had wanted kids forever, but they couldn’t have them, so it worked out.” He softens a little at the memory. Probably that truth was a simple matter of expedience, because the sorcerer who made his memories couldn’t actually change his DNA to match his parents’. But it’s nice that his life hadn’t started with a lie.

“But you still feel like you’re not real?” Dawn asks. She’s not eating anymore, Connor notices.

“I met my birth father last summer,” he says slowly, trying to feel around the story for the truths he can tell. “He’s a good guy. He just...has a different lifestyle.” Which makes it sound like he’s a drug dealer, or a drag queen. Or a drug dealing drag queen. “Anyway, I want to get to know him, but I feel sort of pulled between two worlds. Like I don’t know which one is my real life anymore,” he finishes, before Dawn can ask any unanswerable followup questions. “Did you ever meet your birth parents?”

“Yeah.” She pushes her plate aside, and something about her laugh sounds strained. “It went badly. Like, whatever you think is the worst thing that could happen, multiply it by a thousand. Maybe a million.”

“Sounds apocalyptic,” Connor says.

Dawn nods. “Trust me, it was.”

***

He’d made plans to see Dawn in a few days, at an interval that hopefully conveyed “I like you more than average” but not “I am about to become an obsessive stalker.” He’s on his way to meet her at the diner when screaming erupts from the freshman dorm.

This is it, he thinks. The first of what will be many Peter Parker moments if he continues this so-called normal relationship with Dawn. He’ll show up late, mussed and out of breath, with some flimsy excuse on his lips -- and since it’s not the 1950s anymore, she’ll probably dump him. 

Which is not a reason to let someone, or something, eat the freshman class. Without breaking his stride, he runs toward the dorm. 

Pushing his way through the crowd of fleeing students, he finds a group of five vampires have barricaded the first floor lounge.

“Free cookies. They fall for it every time,” the leader says, snatching a wibbling frat boy from the floor.

Another of the vampires points at Connor. “Hey, one of the snacks wants to fight us.”

The leader turns toward Connor slowly, still holding the crying frat boy. “Normally I’d be up for it, but frankly, I just want to eat. So how about you turn around and walk away and let us get on with the meal?”

A third vampire smirks. “There’s five of us and one of you.”

“So get a few more guys, and then it will be a fair fight,” Connor shoots back. Honestly, he’s pretty proud of his banter game. It’s the one thing Connor-the-regular-dude does better than Connor the Destroyer. 

The fourth vampire is edging into the corner, trying to discreetly drag along a guy who looks like he could be a linebacker. Hoping to get a snack before the fight breaks out, Connor figures, but that’s not going to happen. With one good kick, he shatters a nearby end table -- which, fortunately, turns out to be made from wood and not that weird fake particleboard that _looks_ like wood but does not actually kill vampires. This is a lesson Connor has learned the hard way.

In between punches and kicks, he surveys the room. A knot of trapped students is cowering in the corner behind… Dawn? One more kick, and he swings around to look again. Definitely Dawn, who’s rummaging in her backpack while tracking the fight with a professional-looking eye.

Four of the vampires are piles of dust on the floor now, and he puts himself in between Dawn and the ringleader.

“Ugh, I was just about to kill him!” she yells. “Get out of my way.”

She steps around him, wielding a can of hairspray and a lighter. When she presses the nozzle, flame erupts, and the final vampire explodes into ashes. Dawn surveys the five piles of dust on the floor, looking nonplussed. “What do you think the university will say?” she asks. “Gas leak or gangs on PCP?”

Connor shrugs. “I’m not sure, but I think all these cookies are ours now.”

Dawn scoops up the packages of Oreos and Chips Ahoy scattered across the half-broken table. “Cookies for dinner? I approve.”

***

They’re eating the cookies on Dawn’s bed, her hip a warm weight against his and their ankles overlapping.

“So,” he says, “You ever think about just getting a flamethrower?”

Dawn makes a derisive noise. “You must be new to this whole undercover demon hunter thing. People ask questions when you carry flamethrowers.” She shrugs. “And besides, they’re heavy.”

“I did get in trouble for having a broad sword and a battle axe in my dorm room, now that you mention it,” he says, carefully separating the layers of an Oreo. Dawn, on the other hand, is shoving the whole cookie straight into her mouth. “You eat those like a savage,” he adds. “See, the right way is to take them apart. You eat the naked half first, and then you eat the other half with the icing face down.”

Dawn defiantly inhales another whole Oreo. “For a guy who grew up in a twisted hellscape, you’re kinda prissy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the Ohio half,” he says, carefully licking away a bit of icing.

“So how did you get from hell to Ohio?” Dawn asks, tilting her head. “I mean, I’m assuming the quip about the twisted hellscape earlier wasn’t actually a quip.”

Connor preens a little at the thought she’d remembered that much of their first conversation. “I came through a rift when I was eighteen. Then my birth dad made a deal with a sorcerer and an evil law firm to give me a new life with a fake set of memories,” he says. Just saying the words out loud makes every muscle in his body relax. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been holding inside him since the day he first met Angel.

Dawn turns to look at him. “Did it work?”

“Kind of?” Connor says, then nods. “Yeah, I think it did. I mean, weird shit happened. The sorcerer who made my fake memories needed me to kill this other sorcerer, so he gave back all the twisted hellscape memories. It’s confusing, having two sets of memories, but I kind of get the benefit of both, you know? Like, I know how to fight demons but also what it feels like to have a normal family.” He looks at Dawn, thinking about the apocalyptic meeting with her birth mom. “Where are you from?”

She chuckles awkwardly. “Oh, you know, Sunnydale and also time immemorial.”

“So you’re, like, ten thousand years old?” And he thought Connor the Destroyer’s affair with Cordy was bad. Apparently he _really_ has a thing for older women, no matter what the life.

“Or millions,” Dawn says softly. “Would it be a dealbreaker if I were, say, forged from primordial energy that opens gateways between worlds? And maybe somebody used me to start the apocalypse once?”

“Nah.” Connor shrugs. “It happens that way sometimes.”

He loops his fingers through Dawn’s, and when he pulls her toward him, she slumps against his shoulder with a soft sigh. He feels all the things he thought he’d never feel again: safe, warm, normal, _whole_ \-- like there’s a bridge between his two worlds and he can walk along it now. Peter Parker was stupid for never telling Mary Jane, he thinks. He never gave her the chance to say _me too_.


End file.
